Pages

About us

We moved out of our cabin in Fairbanks, AK and are traveling for the next 6-12
months. Our plans include 2.5 months backpacking through the southern Andes in
Argentina and Chile, followed by 3 months bicycling from Slovenia to Finland. After
that, we’ll head back to Alaska for the summer and then on to who knows where…but
it will probably involve a fall canoe trip. We love to travel and have already been to more
than 15 countries in 4 continents together, and on countless wilderness trips, since we met in Finland in
2004. This seemed like the perfect time to take a longer trip: to be physically
active every day, to experience new cultural settings, and to unhurriedly
explore some new places that fascinate us.

These Ed Abbey quotes we heard recently from
friends keep coming to mind as an encapsulation of what we are doing and why:

“Chop wood. Make things. Play with your child. Share with your friends.
Grow something. Moderate your wrath, moderate your anger, pacify your
hatred. Build a cabin in the woods or a hut in the desert. Avoid the
cities."

"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be
as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted
fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and
adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to
enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and
fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the
forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of
that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the
precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy
yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the
body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you
this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women
with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk
calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”

- Edward Abbey

We’ve never kept a blog before but this seems like a good
occasion to start.